


Flare and Fade

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Amy is as kind to Rory as she knows how to be, Gen, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, but she doesn't really know how to be, less dark than the summary would imply, pre/during the eleventh hour, the effects of not being allowed to trust your own memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 16:48:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13528467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: Amy has spent her entire life unsure of what is real and what isn't. When she was eight, she trusted a raggedy man in her backyard without hesitation or reservation. That was the last time.





	Flare and Fade

**Author's Note:**

> I've been gaslit my whole life. Not everything, but any and enough things. I've been rewatching Amy's arc and I have a lot of feelings about the fact that when we meet her as an adult, she is so very willing to accept someone else's version of events as truth-- or at least, she finds it impossible to defend her own versions of what's happened. I wanted to dig into that a little. This might strike you as slightly ooc, and I did take a couple of liberties with canon, but overall I hope it reads the way I intended.

When Amelia Pond is nine, she wakes up crying from a nightmare where nobody believed in stars or outer space except her. She kept tugging on their clothes, drawing pictures of stars for them to look at, even stomping on their toes when they wouldn't look at her and listen, but the adults only scolded her and told her to be a good girl. Alone in her room, Amelia fists her duvet against her damp eyes and stares back up and out the window at those reassuring lights above. With her room lit by the warmth of her nightlight, they aren't so easy to see, but she can make them out if she concentrates.

  
A sudden doubt, a thought slipping through the cracks of her half-asleep mind: are the stars real, or has someone put lights up there to stop anybody noticing there aren't any? She closes her eyes and tries to block out the thought, but now she's had it, it keeps leaking into her mind. A strange slipping feeling starts in her thoughts. It's always been there, in a way, but never so present as it has been the last year. She'd thought her mum and dad were real, but they were just dreams she had. She'd thought living in Scotland was real, but her Aunt insisted she picked up the accent from too much telly, and the neighbors had pictures of her playing with their children as babies. She'd thought the raggedy doctor was real, but he... _well_ , she thinks, as she always does, _he's just not back to prove everyone wrong yet_. Amelia swings her feet off the bed and rifles through her desk until her hands close around the astronomy textbook she got last Christmas. She falls asleep holding it tight to her chest, pressing hard so that the edges of the spine dig into her arms and she knows it's real, even if the signature inside used to say "love, Mum and Dad," and now it's gone.

 

Amelia-call-me-Amy Pond is fourteen, and she's sitting on her bed and staring at the collection of stolen items she has nicked from Rory when he comes in after school. He doesn't notice her expression at first, tossing his backpack onto the floor and proclaiming loudly that Ms. Binns has it out for fourth years before collapsing backwards onto her bed and wincing when something digs into his side. He reaches around and pulls it up to his face, staring perplexed at the plastic Roman in his hand. "That's my favorite action figure," he says, confused. "I thought I lost it years ago. Where did you find it?" She pulls her gaze up from the bed and stares at him silently. He folds quickly, as he always does, and when he looks away he notices the other things scattered between them. His eyes take in the small stuffed dog, the die-cast taxi, the lego Star Wars figure he'd spent an afternoon gluing into permanence. He's bewildered when he looks at her again, but she's steeled herself for that honest face already and she waits for him to figure it out.

"Amelia-- er, Amy," he stutters when her eyes narrow. "These are all...mine." She waits. He looks like he might let it go, and a year or two ago he might have, but she didn't bring all of this out in the open to watch him run, so she doesn't flinch when she sees him decide to stand up for himself. "Wh--why...why did you take these?" he asks. "You could have played with them whenever you wanted, I mean, I...I thought I must be losing everything. You told me you hadn't seen them." He's holding the stuffed dog close to his chest almost as though he doesn't realize it, and the hurt she expected is there in his eyes, but he isn't angry. Only confused, only ever confused when she hurts him.  
"You're my friend," she says, but it doesn't have the meaning behind it that she'd worked so hard to include when she'd practiced this.

  
He positively blushes, but he picks himself up, brave boy, and keeps going. "Yeah you're my friend too," he says, "but friends don't take other people's favorite toys and keep them for years. What did you even want them for?"

  
She opts for the offensive, as is her wont, and leans forward to wrap him in a hug. His arms come up automatically, and he hovers them as he fights the part of him that wants to hug her back. She smells his shoulder, the soap and the sweat and a little bit of that acne cream he's been swearing has made some immeasurable difference. "You're real," she says to the wall behind him.

His head cocks slightly; she can feel his shoulders relaxing, his breath over her shoulder. "Course I'm real," he says. "We play 'real or not real' all the time and you're great at it. Of course I'm real."

"You're real," she repeats, "so you can have it back." He goes stiff as the words sink in; his breathing halts. 

"Oh," he says. She doesn't reply. His arms come back up, awkwardly, and rest across her back. "You wanted them in case I disappeared?" She nods, just once. He squeezes tighter than she'd been expecting-- good on you, Rory-- and rests his chin fully on her shoulder. "So....is this like a graduation for me?" he asks. She huffs a laugh and wipes an errant tear away before letting go and returning to her spot on the bed. He's as red as she's ever seen him-- and bless him, it is so easy to get him worked up-- but he doesn't look hurt anymore and something cracks loose in her heart as he picks up the lego TIE Fighter and holds it out to her. "Keep this one," he says, trying and failing for eye contact. "I made it for you anyway." She takes it and holds it close to her heart as he unzips his backpack to put the rest of them inside. 

Something occurs to him as he sets the last of the items inside and begins to zip it back up. "Have you taken any of Mel's things?" he asks.  
Amy had not been expecting that. "Yes," she says stiffly, eyes wide. "But she always notices." 

Rory, sweet Rory, Rory who always assumes the best of everyone, chuckles as he sets the backpack down on the ground and kicks off his shoes. "Yeah," he says, stretching back onto the duvet. "She's tough to get anything past."

 

 

Amy Pond is twenty, and she carries two childhoods within her. They're mostly the same, but one of them is full of things that happened and one is full of things that didn't. She's great at separating the two, knowing which events go together in which version. She's not so great at knowing which is which. She's learned, though, to say the things she hears and remembers out loud, so that the nearest person can tell her which category it belongs in. She has had a mum and dad, and no aunt. She has also never had a mum and dad, only ever an aunt who was little more than a child's idea of an adult and who had died as soon as Amy had come of age to take over the house. She has a pamphlet from the funeral, but her memory of it is in only one of her realities. 

Recently, though, there has been less and less need to categorize the two. They've been agreeing more, she considers as she washes out her cereal bowl and sets it on the counter to dry. These days, the discrepancies are smaller. When they can't find the remote at Rory's and his father jokes that she took it home with her so he couldn't hog the telly on game day, she mentally runs through her previous night to try and double check even as she laughs along. Rory squeezes her hand and gives her his nervous smile. She wonders if he'll ever get used to having boyfriend privileges. Probably not until she gets used to giving them. 

She's thinking about boyfriend privileges when the sound starts outside. She's frozen before her mind even has the chance to place it, something fundamental within her having ground to an immediate halt. Also her lungs. She wrenches her unwilling body around to look out the window, and the terrible slipping feeling that accompanies the worst of her questioned memories wells up in her chest and her head because it's there. That blue box is there and there's a figure coming out of it and he's shouting and there's a scream lodged in her throat and she doesn't know if it came out if it would be joy or fear. Maybe she's finally cracked. Poor Rory, she thinks desperately, he deserves someone who doesn't see scrawny madmen materializing in her yard every couple decades. He's at the door now; she can hear him rattling around and shouting her name, rattling on and on about prisoner zero like he was jumping back into the middle of a twelve-years-gone game of pretend. She forces air into her lungs and moves.

 

When she cracks the cricket bat against his head, there's a grim sense of satisfaction, like she's struck a blow to the root of her problem. As she drags him to the radiator-- her room didn't feel right and he's heavier than he looks and oh god what if he wakes up--she wonders desperately, breathlessly-- hopefully?-- which version of events he'll fit into this time.


End file.
